Did the government hack a CBS journalist? Maybe.

Sharyl Attkisson claims to have evidence, but she isn't sharing it all.

Sharyl Attkisson was hacked. The computers used by the former CBS News investigative reporter were found to have been remotely accessed and tampered with, according to both a CBS-hired forensics expert and a reputable information security firm that did an analysis commissioned by Attkisson herself. Those are the facts as we know them.

Currently, that’s where the facts end and the allegations begin. Attkisson, whose book Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation and Harassment in Obama’s Washington was released this week, claims to have evidence that she was hacked by someone working for the government. She says the digital intrusion was part of a campaign to get her to stop pursuing stories critical of the Obama administration. [Attkisson, in a follow-up e-mail, clarifies: "I theorize the digital intrusion was an attempt to surreptitiously monitor my work to see who was talking to me and how much I knew on various stories."]

Attkisson is confident in her story, but others aren't so sure. Some aspects of her account don’t resonate well with many of the people in the security field that Ars has spoken to [including Robert Graham of Errata Security, who posted an analysis of Attkisson's claims on his blog, and dozens of others I spoke with both via public Twitter conversations and in person. David Ottenheimer of Flyingpenguin, Jeremi Gosney of Stricture Group and Sagitta Systems are also on the record here, and a few others—the majority of them politically opposed to the Obama administration—have declined to be named because they would rather not get "thrown into that hornet's nest," as one said.] Certain details of Attkisson's sound like they’re right out of a bad hacker movie or some episode of a CBS drama.

In the hope of getting some clarity about what did and what did not happen to Attkisson’s computers and other aspects of her digital life, Ars interviewed the reporter directly. We talked on the phone, and Attkisson provided an advance copy of her book. Perhaps, we thought, we could get past the largely partisan back-and-forth over her accusations and independently assess the relevant claims—that because of Attkisson's views against the current administration, she was a target for government-directed surveillance and intimidation.

Frustratingly, things are not that simple. While Attkisson stands by the reporting she did to back up this tale of federal spy games, independent verification of her claims is currently impossible for a variety of reasons. So for now, Attkisson’s story rests on trust of her journalistic integrity and her sourcing—at least until she can publicly share the evidence that she and a private information security company are sitting on.

It's important to note that the lack of independently verifiable evidence doesn’t mean she is a crackpot. Given the other context of Attkisson’s story, it’s a perfectly reasonable assumption to believe that someone with government connections was messing with her computers. But while she has a reputation as a tenacious investigative journalist, Attkisson's current story becomes more difficult to believe because of one simple fact.

Technically speaking, it often reads like she has no idea what she’s talking about.

The inexpert witness

Attkisson struggles with the technical content just as her colleagues in the mainstream television news business as a whole have struggled (and sometimes failed spectacularly) before her. With a cast of mysterious sources and a jumble of technical terminology that complicates rather than clarifies, Attkisson has a hard time in her retelling of her trip down the cyber rabbit hole without sounding like she’s shouting “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?”

She knows it, too. Attkisson admitted she was uneasy about talking to Ars because she was afraid of coming off like an idiot to a more technical audience than her usual base—people who are political geeks, not technical ones. At the end of our conversation, she made a simple request: “Please don’t make this a tinfoil hat article.”

[Sharyl Attkisson comments, "Regarding your reference to my “tin foil hat” request, could you please add the context that you were first to raise the phrase earlier in the conversation? I don’t typically use the phrase, and I didn’t raise it out of the blue, and I think it helps to know that. Otherwise it seems a bit misleading as if that is somehow my general mindset." The phrase was used in reference to the response to her allegations in conversations with security professionals and other sources.]

To be fair, Attkisson’s writing on the technical details of her ordeal are a notch better than what usually results when mainstream media journalism and technology collide. This year has been replete with the train wrecks that usually follow that collision. Recent cable and network news coverage of issues like Heartbleed, Shellshock, and the celebrity photo hack known as “the Fappening” demonstrated that TV news is ill-equipped to deal with modern technology, an increasingly important part of people’s daily lives. Mainstream news appears unable to cover this beat in a way that doesn’t end up distorting information to the point where the reporting is useless—or even harmful—to the public interest.

Attkisson acknowledged that technology is a topic that causes TV news organizations to fall flat on their faces with regularity (and, she added, the same goes for economics). “They’re not in our wheelhouse,” she explained. “I may be a hair better than some, but we’re all very poorly informed about all of this. I hate to say we’re lazy, but it’s hard to learn about a whole industry in a few hours or a day. It’s not something you can be a quick study on.”

Apparently, few television journalists spend enough time covering technology to build any sort of understanding of the field, because tech and security stories are a hard sell to begin with. “It’s hard to visualize, so in television news it’s considered sort of boring,” Attkisson said. “There’s the idea that the public won’t be interested or stay interested. And the story has to be simple—and that’s just not possible [with technology]."

So while Attkisson and others in her field spend much of their careers developing sources in government, for example, they are left short-handed when trying to find an expert source on security. Many of Attkisson’s sources in the book are people she encountered largely because she lives in Northern Virginia, among denizens of the government-cyber-military-industrial complex. And while these sources may be “excellent,” as Attkisson contended during our interview, her recounting of what they tell her is often jarring to anyone who’s familiar with technology. She is her own worst witness.